ABOUT THE EXILES' GALLERY (Listed as #25 on the National Post's list of the Best Books of 2015)

Widely praised for her engagement and her attention to craft, Elise Partridge's The Exiles' Gallery confirms her standing as one of the most thoughtful, authentic voices in contemporary poetry. The poems in her third collection continue to explore what she has called "implicit questions about fullness of life or lives somehow thwarted, diminished or ended too early." Through formal technique, painterly detail, or her signature compressed directness, Patridge's poems explore the past, present and future with compassion and grief, bearing witness to our not-so-still, all-too-brief lives.

Above all, The Exiles' Gallery is a book of celebration. In these restless, nimble, and complex poems of apprehension -- whether by a candid glance backward at childhood or through tributes to friends -- Patridge's arresting images and diction give shape to the complexity and abundance of experience, made more luminous and gilt-edged by the corridor of encroaching shadows. Dispossessed but defiant, these are songs of preservation and love.

THE NATIONAL POST LISTS THE EXILES' GALLERY AS #25 ON ITS BEST BOOKS OF 2015

In her final book of poems, Partridge’s inspired diction and generous appraisal of life in all of its terrible brevity is a masterstroke ending to a beautiful career. Having finished these poems shortly before dying of cancer, the straightforward poet writes about the terrible darkness with a remarkably guileless lack of cynicism. See list

NEIL SURKAN REVIEWS THE EXILES' GALLERY IN THE PURITAN

Partridge's assortment of subjects comes together in an idiosyncratic but intimate way, like lingering in an expertly curated room. Her final offering is a fragile web of relationships between people, places, objects and memories, held together by love in the face of death. As such, The Exiles' Gallery is a subtly courageous final collection...more

QUILL AND QUIRE GIVES "RECOMMENDED" STAR IN ITS REVIEW OF THE EXILES' GALLERY

...the profuse skill in these poems denies the claim to amateurism. Within her stanzas, Partridge frequently uses a structural form of internal and end rhyme that denies conventional definition – what might be dubbed the Elisian stanza. These formal constraints, combined with fresh description, fashion The Exiles’ Gallery as a poets’ poetry collection, infused with both an appreciative eye and sorrowful surrender...more